MATHS AND MORALITY Aditya Ghosh and Sea-Yun Pius Joung explore an unlikely source for ethical guidance.
I
n Ethics, a central problem is what Nietzsche coined as the death of God. ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him’. Unlike the triumphalist tone that New Atheists have framed this in, the original formulation was one of fear and angst. It was as though the one source of truth, God, had ceased to exist. The problem is, ‘In a post-God, secular age, what should a consistent ethical system look like?’. It seems impossible to guarantee a natural set of rules from which to hang our system of ethics without an absolute starting point like God. It is not readily apparent from reason alone, why we should value human rights to begin with.
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